Tesla is reporting they will launch a robotaxi service in June in Austin, Texas starting with 10-20 vehicles. This market will resolve "yes" if a Tesla robotaxi is involved in any motor vehicle collision, regardless of fault or severity, within 90 days of launching. It will resolve "no" if no MVC is reported after 90 days of launching. It will resolve 'N/A" if robotaxis fail to launch by the end of the summer, or launch with in-car safety drivers. If remote safety drivers are utilized rather than in-car safety drivers, the market will not be resolved "N/A" and will continue to use the original resolution criteria. Resolution date will be modified based on robotaxi launch date.
Resolution will be based on official reports from Tesla, law enforcement, or credible news sources.
Update 2025-05-07 (PST) (AI summary of creator comment): In response to user questions regarding intentional collisions (e.g., deliberate acts of vandalism or road rage resulting in a collision with a Tesla robotaxi):
The creator has affirmed that the market will resolve based on the occurrence of any motor vehicle collision, as per the original criteria.
No exception will be made if a collision is deemed intentional.
The creator stated that judging intent is considered too perilous, reinforcing that resolution will proceed based on the existing criteria, regardless of fault or the intent behind the collision.
Update 2025-06-22 (PST) (AI summary of creator comment): The creator has clarified that the market will not resolve to N/A if the vehicles utilize in-car safety monitors.
This is being treated as distinct from the original N/A condition for in-car safety drivers.
1,000🏅 Top traders
| # | Name | Total profit |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Ṁ90 | |
| 2 | Ṁ40 | |
| 3 | Ṁ26 | |
| 4 | Ṁ25 | |
| 5 | Ṁ24 |
People are also trading
I initially didn't think the incident that @MachiNi pointed out counted because the person who posted the video said he wasn't sure there was a collision. He now says, "in retrospect its obvious the tire if the Tesla vehicle did touch the other car..." The YouTube video below at time 6:25 convinced me. In regards to @dreev comment, I explicitly wrote a collision would count regardless of severity so I'm sticking with my original criteria.
@WrongoPhD I bet no at 80% thinking you wouldn't be this petty, but I guess technically you're correct.
@Bair I agree that this does feel like a bullshit outcome since it doesn't seem like a noteworthy collision. In attempting to create resolution criteria that would be totally objective, I accidentally I painted myself into a corner into having to count this boring, trivial collision.
For what it's worth, I would have bet no but didn't want to bet on my own market.
@WrongoPhD update: it touched the other car: https://insideevs.com/news/764905/tesla-robotaxi-first-crash-parked/
Oh man, it's like the safety monitors all over again. Or the almost-maybe-sorta-public launch. Every question about Tesla's robotaxis manages to play out in the most ambiguous way conceivable. Does a tire gently touching another car count as a collision? Maybe this will be a case for resolve-to-PROB, if we don't see a bona fide collision by the end of the 90 days? Cuz it's maybe kinda barely a collision? Or almost one?
I think my own intuition is that it's gotta at least leave a mark in order to count. Or the passengers have to actually feel something. (Disclosure: I'm a very small NO holder but I don't think that's influencing me here. My non-monetary/mana-tary biases are bigger and in the opposite direction.) Ultimately it's up to the market creator to make the call though.
PS: I'm looking at the frame of the video supposedly showing that contact was made and it looks utterly inconclusive to me.
@dreev Frankly to me this doesn’t look like a ‘collision’ but I was wondering if it should count for this market since it’s reported as an ‘accident’ and the creator stipulated severity didn’t matter.
@MachiNi I had an interesting side conversation with the market creator here. Most importantly, I was convinced that they've done they best they could in resolving this fairly. They just backed themself into a bit of a corner with the "regardless of severity" in the market description. (I was previously worried about the "regardless of fault" clause, that that takes us too far from the spirit of the question. But that one seems not to have mattered in the end.)
Anyway, more thoughts from that conversation:
One could argue that, quibbles about what counts as a collision aside, this gentle tire-kissing constitutes a failure of the collision detection system. And that does get to the spirit of the question.
In retrospect (not that it's too late to make another market!) I'd rather see a prediction about whether a robotaxi makes a safety-critical error -- something that could hurt someone. If that happens, but no one happens to get hurt due to luck or human intervention, that's still the kind of failure we want a probability on.
In this market we ended up with something like "will a robotaxi and another car come into contact in any way for any reason?" which, in retrospect, is a poor proxy for the question of interest: Is Tesla being reckless in a way that could hurt people?
In conclusion, making markets is hard work! In particular, there's a tricky balance to strike between the spirit of the question and clean, objective resolution criteria. This market turned out to err too far towards the latter but the creator did this all in good faith. I'm giving them 5 stars.
@dreev I gave them five stars too. I think they did a perfectly fine job. I agree with what it is we should be trying to predict and it’s hard.
I originally said I'd NA this market if it used in car safety drivers. The in car safety monitors are but exactly drivers, so I'm going to let this market continue unless there are strong objections. Ninety days from launch of the service is Sept 20th. The market closes 1 day after than to allow time to find evidence of last minute accidents.
@dreev Accidents during testing don't count. Robotaxis have you actually launch for this market to have any chance to resolve yes.
Thanks for creating this! I see why you wouldn't want to adjudicate the question of fault but I worry that too much probability mass is on accidents like being rear-ended at a red light that there's literally nothing the car can do anything about. I think Waymo has a fair number of those. I was going to suggest a clarification that the car has to be moving, but there are plenty of ways that the car's lack of moving can be exactly what's at fault. Running markets sure is hard work!
@dreev I don't think its worth trying to assign fault when only 10-20 cars are driving. In 90 days they still shouldn't have enough miles that being the victim if someone else has driving is likely.
@WrongoPhD This strikes me as missing the factor of public sentiment. Human drivers seem willing, sometimes, to deliberately crash into entities-on-the-road they particularly dislike—see e.g. the bit on road rage here—and, while the number of Tesla robotaxis will be low, the number of human drivers in Austin who might have grudges against Musk which they could decide to take out via crashing into a Tesla robotaxi is high. (See incidents over the last few months of Tesla vandalism in the context of people being upset about DOGE; see also Austin's population generally favoring the Democratic party, voting-patterns-wise.)
None of which is to imply that it's not also possible that the Tesla robotaxis will crash at disproportionately-high rate due to their own internal issues, of course. But I don't think the external factors are negligible here.
@Tulip Oof, great point. Is it too late to add an exception for non-accidents, ie, intentional collisions?